Because the banks are the professionals whose job it is to protect the money they are holding on behalf of others?
There are numerous ways to prevent phishing from working, they just all cost more than blaming the customer. Right now we have banking security that is only slightly more rigorous than making people pinkie-swear they are who they say they are.
Does that mean that a genius shouldn't learn patience?
None of the kids should be victims of a well-intentioned experiment. Yes, they need to learn patience (and will in time, as most kids do), but making some other kid have to put up with the first kids' learning curve because it's cheaper than getting a real teacher is, IMHO, obnoxious in the extreme. We require adult professional teachers to take extra training before they work with special needs kids because even the sympathetic patience of an adult (who loves teaching and CHOSE IT as their life goal!) can be sorely tried by someone who needs the same thing repeated 20 times in 10 different ways to "get it", and then will still sometimes not retain it unless it is reinforced again and again and again and again over long periods of time.
I actually had a large family, but that's completely irrelevant. I'm talking about pretty much every very bright kid I've ever known or read about -- they're not the most patient kids past a certain threshold. And kids as a whole are not patient to begin with. They're still kids, it takes time for the idea that the other people are real and the world is not all about their life to really sink in.
These kids who are "just kids suppoed to be getting an education" get it after 5 minutes, and would probably have a lot more fun trying to teach another kid rather than getting bored out of their skulls. Don't sell them short.
Well we aren't talking about some hypothetical creature under observation here. Many slashdotters were "These kids" a few years/decades ago. I for one know that neither I nor my friends had any sort of patience with those we viewed as "stupid" (because they couldn't learn something totally "obvious" as quickly as we could) and that being expected to put up with them would have driven me into a near homicidal level of frustration. And I didn't know many students who were interested in being "showed up" by some smart kid.
It's one thing to seek out a peer tutor because you want some help in chemistry, it's another to be told by an adult in charge "Billy is a lot smarter than you are, Timmy, so even though you could kick his ass in 2 seconds flat, we want you to sit quietly while he explains to you over a period of weeks what a moron you are".
If some kids want to teach other students, more power to them, I think it would be fantastic. But my experience growing up does not in any way correlate with the notion that kids are "more receptive" to being taught involuntarily by a more successful peer, nor does my experience support the idea that academically successful students are in any way emotionally or socially capable of handling something as complicated as a special needs student -- or that they would be even remotely interested.
The idea that such a program in any non-voluntary participatory basis would be a success simply conflicts with everything I experienced in childhood, have discussed with others about their childhoods, or have read about. Most kids are kind of assholes, because they haven't fully developed empathy and they still have a lot of insecurities about their own identity, and it takes the patience and ability to set aside ego that adults (should) have to put up with that on a regular basis. Heck, putting up with asshole smartypants without punching someone in the face is the number one job requirement for most technical managers, and look at how much love there is for managers here on slashdot (aka the asshole smartypants blog):)
Gravity does not cuase this, warped space causes this and gravity is something that we observe as a result of warped space.
Um, no. General Relativity (a mere "theory" with less evidence than Evolution, yet you seem to treat it as a fact?) postulates that warped space is the cause of gravity (it is certainly an excellent visualization tool), but since we know there are places where general relativity fails, it is clearly NOT the complete answer.
And as long as we're being pedantic for the sole purpose of making it sound like the post we're responding to is hopelessly wrong for some obscure technical reason, you're confusing gravity with gravitation. Gravity is just as I described it, what you're arguing over (and yet still inexplicably wrong about) is gravitation.
As to the rest of your hopelessly cliched responses, I'm sorry I cannot provide you with a simple experiment to perform in you kitchen involving baking soda, rubber bands and an empty 2-liter bottle to prove evolution occurred. If you have access to a genetic testing laboratory and an open mind, though, spending a few months examining DNA from several thousand different contemporary and historical organisms is enough to convince anyone (who doesn't have a religious reason not to believe) that evolution has occurred. That's ignoring the approximate eleventy billion other pieces of evidence spread amongst the fields of genetics, medicine, zoology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, etc -- none of which single-handedly "proves" evolution, but when taken cumulatively provides a rather astonishingly ironclad level of proof that few scientific theories can claim. There have been plenty of new fields of science invented in the past century, AFTER the basics precepts of evolution were established, and for some inexplicable reason every one of them has only made discoveries that supported the notion of evolution, and not a single discovery has undermined it -- something that even Einstein's greatest theories of physics can not claim.
But nobody's religion depends on Einstein being wrong, so we accept that his theories were only 99.9% accurate and that we have more things to discover. That's how science works, there's no shame in admitting we don't know HOW or WHY changes occur and propagate in populations, all we know is that they do. And that over time such small changes cause a process we call evolution.
You can easily find many bibliographies to numerous research studies, experimental tests, etc, if you bothered to spend a few seconds with Google and were genuinely interested (or you could go down to your local campus bookstore and purchase any biology textbook written after 1970). Of course, we both know you have little genuine interest in the mountains of evidence that prove evolution has occurred, because you don't even know that speciation (a somewhat vague word without a strict scientific meaning, but Creationists seem to love using it) has been observed and documented numerous times. You just like throwing out silly challenges ("prove that evolution occurred in 12 seconds or less, or my pizza is free!") so that you can feel more confident in your ignorance.
you speak of scientific theories being confirmed tens of thousands of times...? Isn't that a bit of a stretch?
Not really -- think of how many undergraduate and graduate students there are out there doing experiments in biology every year. Zoologists, Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, Botanists, Astronomers, Physicists, Physicians -- every one of them is performing numerous experiments that have the potential in just a few minutes to prove that everything we know is wrong. It only takes one experimental result that contradicts a theory to shoot it down, or at the very least cause it to be changed significantly. That's the whole problem with gravity right now -- we thought we knew how it worked once Einstein was done with it, then we invented better equipment for other purposes and accidentally realized there were strange things happening with gravity at scales we'd never been able to examine before.
You don't have to set up a test or simulation proving eons worth of mutations to prove that evolution is a fact, that's one of the fallacies of the religious right ("if you can't see it with your own eyes, you can't REALLY KNOW it happened"). You have to look at the evidence in support of it, and then test it's predictive power millions and millions of times and if it's never wrong, then it's a pretty darn good theory. (how many DNA samples have been taken in the past 50 years? How many new species of plant and insect and microbe have been discovered? how many diseases have changed? how many generations of organisms have been bred in captivity and manipulated and observed? How many fossils have been discovered? Any one of those events could have disproved evolution! Yet not only did that NOT happen, discoveries in entirely new fields also happened to agree complete with the notion of evolution!)
Think of it this way -- I assume you're not a thousand years old. Neither am I. So neither of us could have witnessed Mount Vesuvius erupting and burying the city of Pompeii. Yet we take it for a fact that it happened. Geologists found a volcano and all sorts of corroborating evidence in the geological record that it erupted at a certain time. Archaeologists found a city buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. Written records of the event from contemporary societies were discovered. Hundreds of different excavations and geological probes and forensic examinations were performed on the site and every one of them supported the notion that the volcano erupted suddenly and buried the city before the citizens even knew what was happening.
Now, I don't have a time machine to go back and watch the eruption. It's entirely possible that space aliens thought dumping ash on a city and planting all kinds of evidence of a volcanic eruption would be a fun practical joke. There's no way anyone can prove or disprove that alternate theory of events. But we treat the volcano theory as a fact because there's simply no evidence to support any other explanation of events, and the space alien theory does nothing to improve our knowledge of anything, it's as useful as saying it was magic.
The only difference between the theory of Pompeii and the theory of evolution is that there's a LOT more evidence of evolution, but there's no religion that finds the notion of Pompeii being buried by a volcano as contrary to their doctrine. If there was a major religion that felt threatened by gravity, you wouldn't be able to turn on the news without hearing about how some subatomic activity is contrary to Einstein's theory of general relativity, and so that PROVES the theory of gravity is a fraud and really God just holds everything down on Earth because he wants to and pushes the planets around the sun because it pleases him to do so.
Have you ever been to Brazil? how do you know it exists? Because others tell you it does, because you've met people who claim to be from there, because it's on every map, because theres a Brazilian consulate in your city? What if they were all
I realize my other response was far too involved for you to probably understand how it was demonstrating your (continued) misunderstanding of the word "theory".
"Theory = fact" is not true, you're correct. But "theory =/= fact" is ALSO not true, which seems to be the misunderstanding you have about the meaning of scientific theory. Theory and fact are not mutually exclusive. My reply was essentially the long way of saying evolution is BOTH a theory AND a fact. That evolution occurred is a fact. That there are ALSO theories of how and why this occurred in no way changes the fact that it occurred.
Saying it is "just a theory, and therefore not a fact" is an incorrect use of the word theory in science.
In science, Theories are as close as anything more complicated than weighing a rock gets to being a fact. They aren't synonymous, but they are as close as possible given that we can never be 100% certain that our senses can be trusted or that we aren't all simply a dream in the mind of a turtle on a beach somewhere. A scientific theory is not a guess or a hypothesis, and scientific theories that have been confirmed tens of thousands of times are.
The "theory" of evolution is a "fact" for any meaningful use of the word fact (though of course some of the mechanisms of HOW the overall process takes place are up in the air). Humans descended from more primitive primates, and they descended from more primitive mammals, and all the forms of life on earth that we've detected so far ultimately descended from a common ancestor. That is as much a provable fact as the Earth revolving around the Sun is, that gravity causes objects to be attracted to each other in proportion to their mass and every other "theory" we all risk our lives on every day with no doubt whatsoever that they are correct.
If you aren't holding on to your chair right now in abject terror that gravity will stop working as you read this, then you know at a gut level how much a "theory" can be a "fact". If you aren't shitting yourself in fear that the Sun will not rise in the East tomorrow morning, then you know that our questions about the mechanisms of gravity have not shaken your "faith" in gravity's presence.
I can guarantee that in the next 50 years the theory of how gravity functions and relates to other physical forces in the universe will be altered, but that does not make gravity itself any less of a fact.
If you want to disagree about how and why mutations occur, why some species go on to reproduce more successfully than others, how environment or other factors affect survival, knock yourself out, a lot of aspects of Natural Selection are still educated guesses. Nobody will question your sanity or intelligence in doubting a particular school of thought of natural selection.
But that evolution occurred on Earth, that we share common ancestors with other primates is a FACT -- as surely a fact as that tectonic plates have shifted and volcanoes have erupted and the Sun is a giant nuclear reactor and gravity will hold you down on the surface of the Earth. You don't have to believe it, the universe doesn't need your faith to make gravity work. But you'll be looked at might funny in educated company if you clutch at every tree and worry it will disappear.
Considering the CFR had nothing to do with the comment the poster was replying to so there was no context and that typing a three letter acronym into Google will get you the phone book, yes it would be helpful to have people occasionally say who the heck they're talking about.
I realize in retrospect that in any thread about Ron Paul there are plenty of one-world-government Trilateral Commission CFR PNAC Skull & Bones conspiracy theorists, but you shouldn't assume normal politically active people lose sleep over the thought of the Freemasons summoning C'thulu in the White House. We sometimes require a reminder of which puppet masters are secretly in control of everything this week.
Katz v United States was the seminal decision that has been referenced at least a billion times in the 50 years since. The SC ruled that the 4th Amendment protects citizens' telephone conversations since they have an expectation of privacy, and it has been examined about a thousand different ways from Sunday ever since with the same basic results (though non-citizens, resident aliens, etc can expect a lesser protection than American citizens eve though they are recognized as having most Constitutional rights while on US soil, but American citizens are protected regardless of their physical location due to their Constitutional protections being a birthright, not a fact of geography.)
I can see your full of it. The constitution doesn't say that a warrant is needed for each and every search. It says that unreasonable searches and seizures can't happen. So is it reasonable or not to listen in on the american side of a conversation when gathering battlefield inteligence?
I just stopped reading right there, because the Supreme Court over many decades and ideological shifts has already spoken on the matter. Eavesdropping on phone calls with Americans on the line requires a warrant from a court, period. You can foam at the mouth and call every Supreme Court Justice since the invention of the telegraph a terrorist, but you'll still be completely wrong.
Your post would probably be more informative if you ever identified who the CFR is, so that we could know why they are the ones making all the decisions.
You know what I needed to get my birth certificate, which counts for the most points in documents?
Picture ID with my name on it. Didnt matter from where. And could have been easily forged.
Wow, you must live in a high-security state. I needed my birth certificate a few years ago and ordered a copy of it from the state online with nothing more than my social security number and $30.
The problem is Congress as a whole is put under that 10% approval rating. Individual representatives or senators aren't rated like that. I wonder what individual approval ratings look like...
It's pretty much a truism that people approve of their own representatives in the 60-80% range, but disapprove of Congress as a whole. Look at Ted Stevens, probably the current congressman everyone in 49 states can agree does nothing but look for ways to waste resources in pork-barrel projects and use seniority to abuse the democratic process in ways that serve to accomplish nothing but damage to our nation as a whole. But of course those 49 states getting screwed by him don't matter, only the citizens of his state matter, and he brings home pork by the cargo ship full, so of course they re-elect him.
Yes, Bush declared a "War on Terror", and then for some reason surrendered completely but kept the military in the field. Truly one of the strangest strategies ever employed, basically a "we had to destroy the village to save it" but on a much larger scale, and right here at home.
Its always good tactic to simply insult those who question you.
Where was the insult? You clearly demonstrated by your misuse of the word "theory" that you were not familiar with it's meaning in the scientific sense, even though your comment was about a scientific theory. The definition is in the dictionary and you found it. Now you know that your original question was meaningless because it was based on ignorance of what the word theory means when talking about the "Theory of Evolution" or the "Theory of Gravity".
Anybody who is familiar with Windows should be able to sit down in front of KDE and figure things out in < 10 minutes. The GUI is what matters, the underlying OS is irrelevant. Same goes for Star/Open Office; anybody familiar with Word should be able to use them easily.
There's a huge difference between "should" and "can". The vast majority of computer users simply have not grasped the abstract concepts that the UI is trying to represent, they've simply memorized specific icons and processes that accomplish what they need to do. Changing the color of the Internet Explorer icon would cause a surge in support calls at most companies' help desks, forget about swapping out Windows for KDE and expecting it to be problem-free. Many, many people are still downright frightened of computers and anything happening in a new way makes them think it is broken.
It all comes down to reasonable and probably cause as the constitution protects us. If they are talking with the enemy, then I (like most Americans who aren't against bush) believe there is both reasonable and probable cause to wiretap them.
I'm not sure you understand the Constitution if you think "they are talking with the enemy" is some sort of magic phrase that obviates the needs for warrants to eavesdrop on Americans. If there's probable cause, then you can go to the FISA court (retroactively even!) and maintain all the secrecy necessary while also following legal due process. It doesn't matter if the American is the target of the wiretap or not, if an American is on the line, you need a warrant. Period.
I'm sorry if you see that as anti-Bush, it's a standard that was stated quite clearly by the Supreme Court of the United States and followed by all the intelligence agencies decades before either Bush was serving in the White House, and it is a standard that Bush and Gonzales have both publicly stated they were ignoring simply because, well, they find it inconvenient to follow the law. "Listening in on Americans" is not any different from "listening in on Americans talking to the enemy" to the courts, particularly when there's no requirement to show probable cause that the person on the other end is actually an enemy.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your desire to simply call anyone who loves the Constitution a terrorist Bush-basher.
How do you falsify neodarwinism's assertion that genetic mutation is random?
Because you don't have to? Nothing in...uh..."neodarwinism"... requires mutation to be random. The only thing evolution requires is that changes happen in a heritable fashion. Whether the changes are random, sequential, round robin, or determined by God, as long as they are passed on to the next generation to be tested for fitness in the environment it's evolution in action.
Ok, I'll bite: If it's a FACT, why is it called a THEORY? It may be a FACT that there is a THEORY of evolution, but that's hardly what you are arguing.
it's a fact that you don't know what the word theory means in a scientific context. there are many dictionaries available online to help you with this problem.
Arguably the theory of evolution as regards macro evolution is NOT fact.
It's only arguable because the rest of your sentence is meaningless. Nobody knows what "macro" evolution is other than Creationists, so it's pretty much impossible to prove or disprove. Everything significant in the scientific theories of evolution and natural selection has been proven multiple times -- at this point we're mostly dickering over the actual lineage of homo sapien, which is almost more of an archaeological issue than a biological one. But the notion that evolution in general is in some way not proven beyond all doubt to anyone who isn't already subscribed to a theological reinterpretation of measurable and quantifiable evidence, is simply wrong.
Either evolution is a fact and literal Creationism is wrong, or millions of people from completely separate societies around the world for the past several millennia have been falsifying data with an alarming degree of uniformity.
Someone examined the same evidence and worked out another solution that you disagree with, and they're instantly "idiots" without the "capacity for critical thinking."
That would be a valid argument if it were true. Nobody has examined "the same evidence" and "worked out another solution".
If you've got a team of researchers who are measuring radioactive decay and finding that it doesn't work the way hundreds of thousands of people before them have measured it to work, you've got a Nobel Prize with your name on it waiting. If you have a team of astronomers who can show that the speed of light behaves differently than Einstein predicted it would over 50 years before it was able to be tested (and proven right), you've got a Nobel Prize waiting for you. If you've discovered that DNA is not a mechanism by which heritable traits can be passed through reproduction, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for you.
There are many who have simply guessed that a mysterious force did X, Y, and Z to make things happen. In science that isn't a "solution", it's just a baldfaced guess, and has nothing whatsoever to do with critical thinking or the framework of logic. Which is fine, if you want to believe in supernatural intervention, there's nothing in science or logic that can or will disprove your belief, and you're entitled to it. But don't try to sell it something other than belief -- it isn't science and it isn't logic, since both of those are formal disciplines that have no ability to incorporate supernatural forces.
Not believing in something, like creationism, doesn't give you the right to describe all those who believe in the presence of a creator as morons or insane.
Knowing that Creationism (as discussed in America today, ie 6,000 year old Earth) is provably false is very different from believing in the presence of a Creator. The OP is right, anyone who believes in literal Creationism is suffering from an inability to accept basic, easily provable facts about the universe around them, and is therefore delusional, mentally challenged, or just not very bright (or possibly a serious existentialist).
That has nothing whatsoever to do with believing in a Creator. Nobody can prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural being, so belief or disbelief says nothing about one's mental capabilities or ability to accept evidence of the world around them. It may point to undue gullibility or skepticism or nihilism or something else, but that's not really what anyone's talking about.
Why is the government on the *federal* level funding science? At most you could argue that it could find science that is directly impacts military standards and equipment for the Navy.
Yeah, there are certainly no military implications to understanding human biology...
And before you think I'm trolling, I'll ask all of you here this: Would you, or would you not, vote for somebody to believed the biblical rapture was close to happening and that their main priority was laying the groundwork for it to kick off?
Well, 49% of the American public voted in the affirmative the last two times...
As far as I can figure, the actual issue is that the Administration holds that the Patriot Act overrules the older legislation and that they are not bound by the FISA process. I tend to agree, since that was the whole point of passing the Patriot Act. It basically suspends part of the constitution and places the USA in a partial state of emergency.
It has nothing to do with the Patriot Act, the administration has basically argued that because we're at war and he's the commander in chief of the military, he can essentially do whatever is necessary to do that job, including collect intelligence, and that the Congress simply has no constitutional authority to restrict him. The argument was not that Patriot superseded FISA, it's that Congress had no authority to pass FISA in the first place decades ago because the President simply can't be told what he's allowed or not allowed to do if he's acting as commander in chief.
Of course, the argument is complete bullshit and the administration knows it (much like the whole "the vice president is not a part of the executive branch") but it provides enough of a fig leaf that they can drag out any challenges to their claims for years in court and in the meantime do whatever they want. They agreed to voluntarily follow the FISA procedures after it became too much of a public argument, but they still don't accept that they are required to.
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Because the banks are the professionals whose job it is to protect the money they are holding on behalf of others?
There are numerous ways to prevent phishing from working, they just all cost more than blaming the customer. Right now we have banking security that is only slightly more rigorous than making people pinkie-swear they are who they say they are.
None of the kids should be victims of a well-intentioned experiment. Yes, they need to learn patience (and will in time, as most kids do), but making some other kid have to put up with the first kids' learning curve because it's cheaper than getting a real teacher is, IMHO, obnoxious in the extreme. We require adult professional teachers to take extra training before they work with special needs kids because even the sympathetic patience of an adult (who loves teaching and CHOSE IT as their life goal!) can be sorely tried by someone who needs the same thing repeated 20 times in 10 different ways to "get it", and then will still sometimes not retain it unless it is reinforced again and again and again and again over long periods of time.
I actually had a large family, but that's completely irrelevant. I'm talking about pretty much every very bright kid I've ever known or read about -- they're not the most patient kids past a certain threshold. And kids as a whole are not patient to begin with. They're still kids, it takes time for the idea that the other people are real and the world is not all about their life to really sink in.
Well we aren't talking about some hypothetical creature under observation here. Many slashdotters were "These kids" a few years/decades ago. I for one know that neither I nor my friends had any sort of patience with those we viewed as "stupid" (because they couldn't learn something totally "obvious" as quickly as we could) and that being expected to put up with them would have driven me into a near homicidal level of frustration. And I didn't know many students who were interested in being "showed up" by some smart kid.
It's one thing to seek out a peer tutor because you want some help in chemistry, it's another to be told by an adult in charge "Billy is a lot smarter than you are, Timmy, so even though you could kick his ass in 2 seconds flat, we want you to sit quietly while he explains to you over a period of weeks what a moron you are".
If some kids want to teach other students, more power to them, I think it would be fantastic. But my experience growing up does not in any way correlate with the notion that kids are "more receptive" to being taught involuntarily by a more successful peer, nor does my experience support the idea that academically successful students are in any way emotionally or socially capable of handling something as complicated as a special needs student -- or that they would be even remotely interested.
The idea that such a program in any non-voluntary participatory basis would be a success simply conflicts with everything I experienced in childhood, have discussed with others about their childhoods, or have read about. Most kids are kind of assholes, because they haven't fully developed empathy and they still have a lot of insecurities about their own identity, and it takes the patience and ability to set aside ego that adults (should) have to put up with that on a regular basis. Heck, putting up with asshole smartypants without punching someone in the face is the number one job requirement for most technical managers, and look at how much love there is for managers here on slashdot (aka the asshole smartypants blog)
Um, no. General Relativity (a mere "theory" with less evidence than Evolution, yet you seem to treat it as a fact?) postulates that warped space is the cause of gravity (it is certainly an excellent visualization tool), but since we know there are places where general relativity fails, it is clearly NOT the complete answer.
And as long as we're being pedantic for the sole purpose of making it sound like the post we're responding to is hopelessly wrong for some obscure technical reason, you're confusing gravity with gravitation. Gravity is just as I described it, what you're arguing over (and yet still inexplicably wrong about) is gravitation.
As to the rest of your hopelessly cliched responses, I'm sorry I cannot provide you with a simple experiment to perform in you kitchen involving baking soda, rubber bands and an empty 2-liter bottle to prove evolution occurred. If you have access to a genetic testing laboratory and an open mind, though, spending a few months examining DNA from several thousand different contemporary and historical organisms is enough to convince anyone (who doesn't have a religious reason not to believe) that evolution has occurred. That's ignoring the approximate eleventy billion other pieces of evidence spread amongst the fields of genetics, medicine, zoology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, etc -- none of which single-handedly "proves" evolution, but when taken cumulatively provides a rather astonishingly ironclad level of proof that few scientific theories can claim. There have been plenty of new fields of science invented in the past century, AFTER the basics precepts of evolution were established, and for some inexplicable reason every one of them has only made discoveries that supported the notion of evolution, and not a single discovery has undermined it -- something that even Einstein's greatest theories of physics can not claim.
But nobody's religion depends on Einstein being wrong, so we accept that his theories were only 99.9% accurate and that we have more things to discover. That's how science works, there's no shame in admitting we don't know HOW or WHY changes occur and propagate in populations, all we know is that they do. And that over time such small changes cause a process we call evolution.
You can easily find many bibliographies to numerous research studies, experimental tests, etc, if you bothered to spend a few seconds with Google and were genuinely interested (or you could go down to your local campus bookstore and purchase any biology textbook written after 1970). Of course, we both know you have little genuine interest in the mountains of evidence that prove evolution has occurred, because you don't even know that speciation (a somewhat vague word without a strict scientific meaning, but Creationists seem to love using it) has been observed and documented numerous times. You just like throwing out silly challenges ("prove that evolution occurred in 12 seconds or less, or my pizza is free!") so that you can feel more confident in your ignorance.
Not really -- think of how many undergraduate and graduate students there are out there doing experiments in biology every year. Zoologists, Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, Botanists, Astronomers, Physicists, Physicians -- every one of them is performing numerous experiments that have the potential in just a few minutes to prove that everything we know is wrong. It only takes one experimental result that contradicts a theory to shoot it down, or at the very least cause it to be changed significantly. That's the whole problem with gravity right now -- we thought we knew how it worked once Einstein was done with it, then we invented better equipment for other purposes and accidentally realized there were strange things happening with gravity at scales we'd never been able to examine before.
You don't have to set up a test or simulation proving eons worth of mutations to prove that evolution is a fact, that's one of the fallacies of the religious right ("if you can't see it with your own eyes, you can't REALLY KNOW it happened"). You have to look at the evidence in support of it, and then test it's predictive power millions and millions of times and if it's never wrong, then it's a pretty darn good theory. (how many DNA samples have been taken in the past 50 years? How many new species of plant and insect and microbe have been discovered? how many diseases have changed? how many generations of organisms have been bred in captivity and manipulated and observed? How many fossils have been discovered? Any one of those events could have disproved evolution! Yet not only did that NOT happen, discoveries in entirely new fields also happened to agree complete with the notion of evolution!)
Think of it this way -- I assume you're not a thousand years old. Neither am I. So neither of us could have witnessed Mount Vesuvius erupting and burying the city of Pompeii. Yet we take it for a fact that it happened. Geologists found a volcano and all sorts of corroborating evidence in the geological record that it erupted at a certain time. Archaeologists found a city buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. Written records of the event from contemporary societies were discovered. Hundreds of different excavations and geological probes and forensic examinations were performed on the site and every one of them supported the notion that the volcano erupted suddenly and buried the city before the citizens even knew what was happening.
Now, I don't have a time machine to go back and watch the eruption. It's entirely possible that space aliens thought dumping ash on a city and planting all kinds of evidence of a volcanic eruption would be a fun practical joke. There's no way anyone can prove or disprove that alternate theory of events. But we treat the volcano theory as a fact because there's simply no evidence to support any other explanation of events, and the space alien theory does nothing to improve our knowledge of anything, it's as useful as saying it was magic.
The only difference between the theory of Pompeii and the theory of evolution is that there's a LOT more evidence of evolution, but there's no religion that finds the notion of Pompeii being buried by a volcano as contrary to their doctrine. If there was a major religion that felt threatened by gravity, you wouldn't be able to turn on the news without hearing about how some subatomic activity is contrary to Einstein's theory of general relativity, and so that PROVES the theory of gravity is a fraud and really God just holds everything down on Earth because he wants to and pushes the planets around the sun because it pleases him to do so.
Have you ever been to Brazil? how do you know it exists? Because others tell you it does, because you've met people who claim to be from there, because it's on every map, because theres a Brazilian consulate in your city? What if they were all
I realize my other response was far too involved for you to probably understand how it was demonstrating your (continued) misunderstanding of the word "theory".
"Theory = fact" is not true, you're correct. But "theory =/= fact" is ALSO not true, which seems to be the misunderstanding you have about the meaning of scientific theory. Theory and fact are not mutually exclusive. My reply was essentially the long way of saying evolution is BOTH a theory AND a fact. That evolution occurred is a fact. That there are ALSO theories of how and why this occurred in no way changes the fact that it occurred.
Saying it is "just a theory, and therefore not a fact" is an incorrect use of the word theory in science.
In science, Theories are as close as anything more complicated than weighing a rock gets to being a fact. They aren't synonymous, but they are as close as possible given that we can never be 100% certain that our senses can be trusted or that we aren't all simply a dream in the mind of a turtle on a beach somewhere. A scientific theory is not a guess or a hypothesis, and scientific theories that have been confirmed tens of thousands of times are.
The "theory" of evolution is a "fact" for any meaningful use of the word fact (though of course some of the mechanisms of HOW the overall process takes place are up in the air). Humans descended from more primitive primates, and they descended from more primitive mammals, and all the forms of life on earth that we've detected so far ultimately descended from a common ancestor. That is as much a provable fact as the Earth revolving around the Sun is, that gravity causes objects to be attracted to each other in proportion to their mass and every other "theory" we all risk our lives on every day with no doubt whatsoever that they are correct.
If you aren't holding on to your chair right now in abject terror that gravity will stop working as you read this, then you know at a gut level how much a "theory" can be a "fact". If you aren't shitting yourself in fear that the Sun will not rise in the East tomorrow morning, then you know that our questions about the mechanisms of gravity have not shaken your "faith" in gravity's presence.
I can guarantee that in the next 50 years the theory of how gravity functions and relates to other physical forces in the universe will be altered, but that does not make gravity itself any less of a fact.
If you want to disagree about how and why mutations occur, why some species go on to reproduce more successfully than others, how environment or other factors affect survival, knock yourself out, a lot of aspects of Natural Selection are still educated guesses. Nobody will question your sanity or intelligence in doubting a particular school of thought of natural selection.
But that evolution occurred on Earth, that we share common ancestors with other primates is a FACT -- as surely a fact as that tectonic plates have shifted and volcanoes have erupted and the Sun is a giant nuclear reactor and gravity will hold you down on the surface of the Earth. You don't have to believe it, the universe doesn't need your faith to make gravity work. But you'll be looked at might funny in educated company if you clutch at every tree and worry it will disappear.
Considering the CFR had nothing to do with the comment the poster was replying to so there was no context and that typing a three letter acronym into Google will get you the phone book, yes it would be helpful to have people occasionally say who the heck they're talking about.
I realize in retrospect that in any thread about Ron Paul there are plenty of one-world-government Trilateral Commission CFR PNAC Skull & Bones conspiracy theorists, but you shouldn't assume normal politically active people lose sleep over the thought of the Freemasons summoning C'thulu in the White House. We sometimes require a reminder of which puppet masters are secretly in control of everything this week.
Katz v United States was the seminal decision that has been referenced at least a billion times in the 50 years since. The SC ruled that the 4th Amendment protects citizens' telephone conversations since they have an expectation of privacy, and it has been examined about a thousand different ways from Sunday ever since with the same basic results (though non-citizens, resident aliens, etc can expect a lesser protection than American citizens eve though they are recognized as having most Constitutional rights while on US soil, but American citizens are protected regardless of their physical location due to their Constitutional protections being a birthright, not a fact of geography.)
I just stopped reading right there, because the Supreme Court over many decades and ideological shifts has already spoken on the matter. Eavesdropping on phone calls with Americans on the line requires a warrant from a court, period. You can foam at the mouth and call every Supreme Court Justice since the invention of the telegraph a terrorist, but you'll still be completely wrong.
Your post would probably be more informative if you ever identified who the CFR is, so that we could know why they are the ones making all the decisions.
Wow, you must live in a high-security state. I needed my birth certificate a few years ago and ordered a copy of it from the state online with nothing more than my social security number and $30.
It's pretty much a truism that people approve of their own representatives in the 60-80% range, but disapprove of Congress as a whole. Look at Ted Stevens, probably the current congressman everyone in 49 states can agree does nothing but look for ways to waste resources in pork-barrel projects and use seniority to abuse the democratic process in ways that serve to accomplish nothing but damage to our nation as a whole. But of course those 49 states getting screwed by him don't matter, only the citizens of his state matter, and he brings home pork by the cargo ship full, so of course they re-elect him.
Yes, Bush declared a "War on Terror", and then for some reason surrendered completely but kept the military in the field. Truly one of the strangest strategies ever employed, basically a "we had to destroy the village to save it" but on a much larger scale, and right here at home.
Where was the insult? You clearly demonstrated by your misuse of the word "theory" that you were not familiar with it's meaning in the scientific sense, even though your comment was about a scientific theory. The definition is in the dictionary and you found it. Now you know that your original question was meaningless because it was based on ignorance of what the word theory means when talking about the "Theory of Evolution" or the "Theory of Gravity".
There's a huge difference between "should" and "can". The vast majority of computer users simply have not grasped the abstract concepts that the UI is trying to represent, they've simply memorized specific icons and processes that accomplish what they need to do. Changing the color of the Internet Explorer icon would cause a surge in support calls at most companies' help desks, forget about swapping out Windows for KDE and expecting it to be problem-free. Many, many people are still downright frightened of computers and anything happening in a new way makes them think it is broken.
I'm not sure you understand the Constitution if you think "they are talking with the enemy" is some sort of magic phrase that obviates the needs for warrants to eavesdrop on Americans. If there's probable cause, then you can go to the FISA court (retroactively even!) and maintain all the secrecy necessary while also following legal due process. It doesn't matter if the American is the target of the wiretap or not, if an American is on the line, you need a warrant. Period.
I'm sorry if you see that as anti-Bush, it's a standard that was stated quite clearly by the Supreme Court of the United States and followed by all the intelligence agencies decades before either Bush was serving in the White House, and it is a standard that Bush and Gonzales have both publicly stated they were ignoring simply because, well, they find it inconvenient to follow the law. "Listening in on Americans" is not any different from "listening in on Americans talking to the enemy" to the courts, particularly when there's no requirement to show probable cause that the person on the other end is actually an enemy.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your desire to simply call anyone who loves the Constitution a terrorist Bush-basher.
Because you don't have to? Nothing in
it's a fact that you don't know what the word theory means in a scientific context. there are many dictionaries available online to help you with this problem.
It's only arguable because the rest of your sentence is meaningless. Nobody knows what "macro" evolution is other than Creationists, so it's pretty much impossible to prove or disprove. Everything significant in the scientific theories of evolution and natural selection has been proven multiple times -- at this point we're mostly dickering over the actual lineage of homo sapien, which is almost more of an archaeological issue than a biological one. But the notion that evolution in general is in some way not proven beyond all doubt to anyone who isn't already subscribed to a theological reinterpretation of measurable and quantifiable evidence, is simply wrong.
Either evolution is a fact and literal Creationism is wrong, or millions of people from completely separate societies around the world for the past several millennia have been falsifying data with an alarming degree of uniformity.
That would be a valid argument if it were true. Nobody has examined "the same evidence" and "worked out another solution".
If you've got a team of researchers who are measuring radioactive decay and finding that it doesn't work the way hundreds of thousands of people before them have measured it to work, you've got a Nobel Prize with your name on it waiting. If you have a team of astronomers who can show that the speed of light behaves differently than Einstein predicted it would over 50 years before it was able to be tested (and proven right), you've got a Nobel Prize waiting for you. If you've discovered that DNA is not a mechanism by which heritable traits can be passed through reproduction, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for you.
There are many who have simply guessed that a mysterious force did X, Y, and Z to make things happen. In science that isn't a "solution", it's just a baldfaced guess, and has nothing whatsoever to do with critical thinking or the framework of logic. Which is fine, if you want to believe in supernatural intervention, there's nothing in science or logic that can or will disprove your belief, and you're entitled to it. But don't try to sell it something other than belief -- it isn't science and it isn't logic, since both of those are formal disciplines that have no ability to incorporate supernatural forces.
Knowing that Creationism (as discussed in America today, ie 6,000 year old Earth) is provably false is very different from believing in the presence of a Creator. The OP is right, anyone who believes in literal Creationism is suffering from an inability to accept basic, easily provable facts about the universe around them, and is therefore delusional, mentally challenged, or just not very bright (or possibly a serious existentialist).
That has nothing whatsoever to do with believing in a Creator. Nobody can prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural being, so belief or disbelief says nothing about one's mental capabilities or ability to accept evidence of the world around them. It may point to undue gullibility or skepticism or nihilism or something else, but that's not really what anyone's talking about.
Yeah, there are certainly no military implications to understanding human biology...
Well, 49% of the American public voted in the affirmative the last two times...
It has nothing to do with the Patriot Act, the administration has basically argued that because we're at war and he's the commander in chief of the military, he can essentially do whatever is necessary to do that job, including collect intelligence, and that the Congress simply has no constitutional authority to restrict him. The argument was not that Patriot superseded FISA, it's that Congress had no authority to pass FISA in the first place decades ago because the President simply can't be told what he's allowed or not allowed to do if he's acting as commander in chief.
Of course, the argument is complete bullshit and the administration knows it (much like the whole "the vice president is not a part of the executive branch") but it provides enough of a fig leaf that they can drag out any challenges to their claims for years in court and in the meantime do whatever they want. They agreed to voluntarily follow the FISA procedures after it became too much of a public argument, but they still don't accept that they are required to.